We have seen a lot of changes in 5 years, and we keep growing. We launched our product to the world 5 years ago to the world at Techcrunch Disrupt with the intent of connecting people with local printers. Our goal is to make printing quicker, easier and more cost effective than traditional methods. While there have been some ups and downs, we have had many amazing accomplishments and customers in five years: Printed millions of business cards and countless other products Processed 10s of thousands of orders Connected 20k + printers through print network Growing a business often takes far longer than one hopes or expects. With unexpected ups and downs comes turmoil and changes. Our team as grown, shrunk dramatically, and now we are growing again. I want to thank Declan Whelan, our original CTO and Co-Founder, and the rest of the people who have contributed their time and energy to build the company. But we must look forward and continue to evolve the platform and grow the company to its next stage. Our team’s expertise got many things right in our first iteration, but there were several technical, marketing and operations items that prevented us from growing as quickly as we would have liked or hoped. Our MVP worked, but we couldn’t scale with how we built the app/company. After speaking to a lot of customers and figuring out what worked well and what needed tweaking, we put our heads down and got to work. After a lot of work and dev efforts, we are happy to announce the largest new launch since the initial release of Printchomp. We fundamentally changed the way the app functions, and stripped it down to its most basic feature set to provide a simple but elegant experience. Why? Easier to Use Faster to Order Easy to Re-Order Focused user experiences Tighter integration with partners to give better options In the coming months we have an aggressive schedule to evolve the platform and take it to the next level. We will be actively soliciting more feedback from customers to make the user experience even better. Our goal is to continue to make Printchomp the destination for printers and print buyers to order print. In one week we relaunch the next generation of Printchomp with our network of 20000+ printers. We are tweaking it up and squashing bugs, and look forward to unveiling our hard work soon! To my fellow entrepreneurs, success is rarely a straight line. There are many opportunities to take the off ramp and give up. Don’t give up work hard, be smart and you will get there....

Over the past year I have been tracking some pretty crazy activity on social media, specifically Twitter. I have long believed there has been an active campaign of bots trying to influence behaviour online. As a fan of Harrison Ford I loved the movie of Bladerunner. An officer sought to differentiate people from bots. I started to catalog repeatable behaviours, I wanted to share my guide of how to spot bots and how to fight them. So here we go … Amazing the number of bots that engage me, they have an obvious tell and I catch them all the time #Bladerunner pic.twitter.com/0Nkmso4SP4 — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 An obvious tell of a bot is that their Profile is hash-tagged to death, they don't directly respond to your commentary and other — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 How to spot a bot! 2/10 – Profile images are generally themed to a certain message#Bots#SocialMedia — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 How to spot a bot! 3/10 – Most of the bots are less than a year old#Bots#SocialMedia — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 How to spot a bot! 5/10 – The response to your tweets with something that states an opinion but not in context #Bots#SocialMedia — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 How to spot a bot! 6/10 – Bots usually swarm via mentioning other bots to create a gang up tactic. #Bots#SocialMedia — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 How to spot a bot! 7/10 – Once in a bot swarm, most will insult you or try to shout you down to make you quiet. #Bots#SocialMedia — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 How to spot a bot! 8/10 – Bot's don't know how to respond to positivity, they expect for you to yell. Be polite!#Bots#SocialMedia — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 How to spot a bot! 9/10 – Bot's won't do math, ask them to do a basic math question. See if they even acknowledge it.#Bots#SocialMedia — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 How to spot a bot! 10/10 – Report all bots. Twitter and other social networks are self monitored. #Bots#SocialMedia — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 To summarize on #Bots – they are actively being used to shape conversation, socially engineer responses. Respond back with greater force — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 Please share these top 10 things to spot #bots on Twitter. It is a simple act of democracy from not letting them pollute the feed! — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 Then it got out of hand …. How to spot a bot...

Sometimes you fail. It has been a year. A whole year since my last episode. You start these things with the best intentions then life sometimes gets in the way. Whether it be running a few companies, building a new house or chasing 2 kids under 5, something had to give and it was the show. Fast forward a year, things are more settled with me on a number of fronts and my little girl started a show with my help and then encouraged me to go back to mine. I wanted to share some of my learnings around helping to create a web show or video blog 4 Tips to Set up a Video BlogI wanted to share 4 Tips to Set up a Video Blog It has been a while since I have posted, but here is my latest. I am changing up the format of my posts and don’t less driven based upon interviews. My first post back is sharing what I have learned for setting up your own video blog or web show. Posted by The Anything Show on Tuesday, June 14,...

Joseph sits down with Ben Parr to discuss Apple, Apple’s Cash hoard, the Apple Car? Social media, inspiration for his book, inequity in tech. Check out his new book on Amazon – one of many shameless plugs 🙂 Joseph learns a valuable lesson that you should never upload a podcast on unreliable Hotel Wifi as it took him nearly a week of failed attempts....

Marketing Automation is becoming a premium for small and large organizations. Over the past 15 years there has been increased pressure to squeeze the most one can out of their marketing dollars. Typically this falls into two camps, the actual money spent on marketing initiatives and the money spent towards the headcount to administer them. The marketing automation dilemma You essentially have a back and forth issue. You don’t want to strip headcount too badly, because it will be difficult to administer campaigns, but you want to maximize the amount you spend on external campaigns that drive people back to your site and drive interest. The first step to solving this dilemma So now you recognize you have this dilemma and the question of how to make strides to maximizing my headcount and at the same time spend money on initiatives that will drive revenue, retention, sign-ups or whatever your key success metrics are. What are the next steps? Strip away non-value additive activities via automation Busy work is the bane of anyone’s existence, but it should also be the first thing in your organization you look to remedy. Physically handling mailing items, stuffing envelopes, or even spending the time managing 3rd parties to do this isn’t additive. In many cases manual interactions not only increase the time that you spend doing other things, but also increase the chance of errors. The irony of introducing more manual work is that it introduces more errors that may require further work to manage. At the end of the day, outsourcing these operations to a 3rd party is crucial to improve efficiency. It improves efficiency for a number of reasons: You won’t ever be able to do something as effectively as a specialized shop – Typically if you are printing and stuffing envelopes, your cost per impression is much higher than a 3rd party shop. You have to consider the time for anyone babysitting the exercise of printing and mailing Print on demand vs. Inventory – One of the essential problems with all in house marketing activities is that you have to print extra and warehouse those extra pieces. Initiate from your systems rather than a spreadsheet – If you have systems for managing people and operations, then why are you exporting to a spreadsheet and manually hand holding the process to completion. It wastes time, while you could automate the entire process. Enter a Print & Mail API A print and mail API is the perfect solution to move manual tasks off of the plate of marketers and just making sure things “happen” on their own automatically. There are many marketing professionals that...

Over a year ago, Printchomp started working on our API. As we brought on thousands of printers we started to have developers reach out to us and ask how they could leverage this network. We quickly obliged them and started building our Print API. If you want to skip the article and get started using the Printchomp Print API go here. Declan Whelan was the primary architect of our API. He wanted to make sure that not only external users could consume it, but our own internal development would be tied to our API infrastructure. This also changed the way we approached our own development of the API as we became primary consumers of it. We built it based upon a number of principles. 1. Scalability – Because we had 1000s of printers and many developers wanting to integrate we needed to make sure it would scale. Scalability meant a number of things. The ability of our printers to handle the load, the ability of external developers to ping our platform as needed as their apps scaled. Additionally scalability is crucial for offerings where we offering Direct Mail integration with our platform. We wanted to make sure if a person initiated a direct mail campaign from our platform it would scale both from a technology and pricing perspective. 2. Flexibility – When looking at the Print API landscape we noticed a few things and this was immediately validated by some of our early customers. When we had people approach us about the lack of customizable products. Because our printer base is so strong, we can literally offer any product under the sun, and customize it for any developer. This gives us a lot of ability to really help solve problems and not just offer a cookie cutter solution. We have the ability to spin up new products for you to order via API in less than 30 minutes if needed. Listen a little bit more about our product selection. One thing that we offer that is unique is multiple pick-pack and ship facilities across North America. That way we can find the best way to distribute based upon price and turnaround time. We can either adopt a print on demand approach or stockpile at our facilities and deplete if there is a fixed demand. 3. Monetization – Most people looking for a Print API are looking for either two principal things, either automation to reduce costs or monetize their digital assets in some way. We wanted to offer a variety of ways for people to monetize their app and providing value within their own ecosystem. So please, if you want to...

Joseph sits down with Jeremy Bell to discuss Teehan and Lax, Design, his startup Wattage and the future of the consumer electronics industry. It was interesting getting his perspective on Teehan given that he was a partner with the firm for 6 years.

Welcome everyone to The Anything Show In our first interview we discuss a number of things with Charles Mire of Structur3d printing, including 3D Printing, getting traction on Kickstarter, entrepreneurship and family, getting traction, customer feedback loops, and the Waterloo region tech...

Over the past year I have been horrible about blogging. In fact after writing 50+ articles in a year, I went to virtually nil. What happened? It was all going so well. Well, life happened. Between building a business, helping my wife start her business, having a new baby, moving to a new home, traveling, trying to stay in shape etc. etc. I haven’t been on the ball. This is no excuse, because others seem to do it, but something I need to fix. I recently completed some personal projects and now am going to make some time for more blogging. Not necessarily for other people, but for myself. I found it to be a wonderfully cathartic exercise that I miss out on. Here are some updates that I will be sharing News on Printchomp – There is so much goodness going on that I need to do a better job sharing how awesome our team is and how much we are growing. Lots of news on this coming soon! Community News – Last year, I wrote my then last blog article on Why I moved back to the Waterloo Region. I have been kindly asked by Kara Swisher to contribute to her new kick-ass blog Re/code. You can expect for me to do a killer update on all the goodness going on with startups near me and the entire scene Startup lessons learned – Over the past 2 years with Printchomp and interacting with other startups, I have learned so much. After having a series of dinners with friends and colleagues namely ones with Scott Oldford and Alkarim Nasser, I realized that if I don’t share these lessons, I think I am missing out on the opportunity to crystallize them in my head and more importantly share them with others. I had an amazing trip to San Francisco a couple months ago and was so neglectful not to share all the cool people I got to meet with. Nope I won’t review your product – I am still getting regular requests to review new products. Unless it is something I stumble upon myself and is absolutely amazing I probably won’t write about it. I won’t do fake sponsored blogs either, unless what you are shilling is absolutely amazing and you’ll give me one (or have a truck full of cash show up). Trends – Being head down in my startup I am seeing a lot of cool technology trends, more importantly potholes and things to avoid. I’m going to try to share this stuff because there are some amazing things going on. Video Studio – I’m happy to...